


Brothers in Blue

by springsnow



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bonding, Fluff, Gen, Hot Chocolate, Kurt's Blue Da Ba Dee Da Ba Daa, Marshmallows, No Beach Divorce, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 13:32:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15631674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/springsnow/pseuds/springsnow
Summary: A late night talk, hot chocolate, and marshmallows.





	Brothers in Blue

**Author's Note:**

> I only just got round to watching X-Men: Apocalypse recently but I'll be damned if young Nightcrawler isn't the most ridiculously adorable character ever. The whole time he was on screen I just wanted to give him a big hug and knit him a sweater. This is just a bit of brotherly bonding and fluff; I thought it'd be cute to have Kurt and Hank bond over their different approaches to being blue.
> 
> A note about the AU thing: this is set in an AU where the beach divorce and events of Days of Future Past never happened, and En Sabah Nur never resurfaced. My basic concept for this universe is that Erik, Raven et al. stayed with Charles, and Raven kind of became Charles' woman on the ground, so to speak - going to talk to mutants that Charles finds via Cerebro, which he can't do himself since, y'know, he's busy running a school. And he's partially paralysed. Anyway, hope y'all enjoy!

Hank yawned and rubbed his eyes. It was nearly midnight—11:47 p.m., to be precise—and he was exhausted. He knew he had to start going to bed sooner, but once he started focusing on something, it was borderline impossible for him to break away from it; he’d even missed dinner tonight, and it was only when he was on his way to bed that he’d realised how hungry he was. “You really do punish yourself in that lab,” Charles had told him once, and he’d been right. He usually was.

Hank’s thoughts (and sandwich making) were interrupted by a sudden _fwoosh_ sound and what looked like a puff of smoke as a small blue figure materialised in front of the fridge. Kurt didn’t notice Hank at first, and instead began rummaging through the fridge. He went past the milk and juice until he found something that seemed to appeal to him a little more—Erik’s beer. Erik refused to drink American beer (or, as he called it, ‘that disgusting watered-down piss you call beer’), and instead bought it from a specialist German store he’d managed to find in New York. Kurt, looking quite pleased with himself, grabbed a can of Erdinger, only to turn around and see Hank. He gasped in shock and dropped the beer; it hit the ground with a dull _thunk_ and rolled away.

“Good thing it wasn’t a bottle, huh?” Hank smiled.

“I’m sorry! I wasn’t—I was just—”

“It’s OK, Kurt. Just put it back. I won’t tell Erik.”

Kurt nodded and tucked the beer back into the fridge. In the light from the open fridge, Hank saw that he was wrapped in a blanket; under that, a faded New Jersey Devils t-shirt and shorts. “Sorry,” Kurt said sheepishly. “I was thirsty.”

“It’s alright. Would you like some hot chocolate?”

Kurt immediately perked up, smiling. “Yes, please.”

Hank grabbed the milk from the fridge. _The problem with Americans, you use water to make everything,_ he remembered Erik saying, and he imagined Kurt would feel much the same. He poured the milk into a pan and spooned the hot chocolate mix into two mugs.

“You seem to be settling in,” he remarked, turning around and leaning on the counter. Kurt had moved to sit down on one of the stools at the counter island. He had also found a packet of Oreos.

“Ja. Everyone here is very nice,” Kurt replied, swinging his legs. “I talk with Erik a lot. He helps me with my English.”

“I’d say your English is pretty good already.”

“Ja, ja, but sometimes I forget words. I am not…how do you say in English? Fließend? Perfect?”

“Fluent?”

“Ja.” Kurt bowed his head. “Sometimes Scott laughs at me but Jean tells him not to be mean. I do not think he means it.”

“Scott’s just like that, I think,” Hank mused. Scott was an OK kid, but he reminded Hank of the boys at school back in Dundee who’d call him Bigfoot then, when confronted, claim it was all just a joke, that Hank shouldn’t be so sensitive all the time.

Kurt nodded. “I did not have friends like this in Germany. I was very, ah…einsam. Lonely.”

“You didn’t go to school?”

“No. When I was born my parents thought I was diseased. When I was five the Stasi came and took papa, and then mama died, so I had to go to an orphanage. They beat me and called me a demon. Teufel.” Kurt suddenly seemed very small, very young, as if he were no older than the age he had been when he had gone to the hated orphanage. “I ran away when I was eleven and I found the circus.”

The milk had started bubbling. Hank stirred it, then poured it into the mugs. “You want marshmallows?”

“The little powdery candies?” Kurt screwed his nose up. “I tried them. They were not very nice.”

“They’re good if you warm them up.”

“In Ordnung,” Kurt said warily. Hank smiled to himself. Kurt was a nice kid—a little odd, but that was the culture shock. Bright blue skin and teleportation ability aside, he was more or less like any other fifteen-year-old.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“Why are you not blue?” Kurt asked. “I hope I am not being rude. But I heard you say you and Raven are not blue anymore. Are you a shapeshifter, too?”

“It’s kind of a long story.” Hank topped Kurt’s hot chocolate off with some whipped cream and handed the mug to him. He sat down opposite him. “When I was a kid, I wasn’t blue at all. I just had really big feet.”

“Like mine?”

“Kinda. My parents took me to about eight different doctors but none of them could work out what it was. Then about twenty years ago, not long after I met the others, I developed this…this medicine that I thought could make my feet look—” Hank bit down on the word _normal_. It was a hard habit to break, but he was starting to break it; he just couldn’t bring himself to say that word to someone as young as Kurt. He worried about not being normal—Kurt had never had any choice. Kurt couldn’t just hide his mutation with a pair of shoes. “I thought it could make them smaller. More…inconspicuous.”

“In…incon…?”

“Less noticeable,” Hank supplied. Kurt nodded and sipped his hot chocolate, leaving a small spot of whipped cream on the end of his nose. Hank gestured, and he wiped it off. “It didn’t work. It turned me into this blue, furry creature. After a few years I managed to get it right and I started taking it. It…made me not blue.”

“And you are still taking it?”

“Yeah. I guess I just got used to…not being blue.”

“Would you ever go back?”

Hank opened his mouth to answer, but found himself hesitating. He’d never actually thought about it before, and now he was being quizzed on it by a teenage boy. Over hot chocolate.

“I don’t know,” he said eventually. “I’d like to say yes, but I just don’t know. Like I said, I just got used to being like this. Maybe one day I’ll start lowering the dosage or something.”

“It is not so bad,” Kurt said. He seemed to be enjoying his hot chocolate. “Sometimes people stare, but I think the world is very different now. When we had the trip to the zoo not many people said things about me.”

He finished his hot chocolate and handed the empty mug back to Hank. “Danke,” he said.

“Don’t mention it.”

“For talking to me, I mean. Or…or listening to me. But also for the hot chocolate.”

“It’s OK. Always happy to lend an ear,” Hank said. Kurt tipped his head to the side, confused.

“Lend an ear?”

“It’s a figure of speech. It means listening.”

“Ah.” Kurt nodded knowingly. “Guten Nacht.” And with that, he was gone in a puff of smoke.

“Good night, Kurt.”


End file.
